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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

It is not actually that hard. My problem here is people making it looks like is something really hard. That is harmful but I've got your point.

Slackware is hard for users who are unwilling to read the ample provided documentation. If a user takes the time to adequately prepare for their first install of Slackware they will prevail.
I do take a look at the grass that appears greener, but, I always return home to Slackware.
Slackware is my home.

It's not an excuse for them, but reviewers have very tight schedules. At best, they can try to install a distro, play around with it for a couple of hours, spend another couple of hours on writing and then have to send their article to the editor in order to keep the deadline.

If they do not happen to use Slackware for many years, they just don't have the chance to learn and understand some of the best things about:

It takes way less effort than any other system I have ever used to maintain it. Despite the seemingly comfortable package management systems of other distros with bells and whistles like dependency resolution (which IMHO is not something evil per se, but just something that is very difficult to do right), they all need a lot more affection and love than this good ole work horse known as Slackware. It took me several years to understand that, myself, and I interpret "Slack" as "relaxed" or "easy going" from a user's as well as an system manager's point of view, since then. In other words: It just works! But how should a writer without this year-long experience have a chance to know that?

Another, similar point: Slackware can be upgraded without doing a fresh install over many, many years and releases. Again, this is practical experience that grows confidence over years. At least, most of the reviewers know about the excellent reputation of Slackware regarding stability and long-term robustness. They just don't (cannot) understand the simplicity of this. They think, it takes super-smart people to keep it going. But I prove them wrong.

Finally, as I have expressed in many other posts here, one VERY important aspect of Slackware is the community. Whenever I had an issue that I was not able to solve myself, I found a helping hand here at LinuxQuestions.net, or received great support directly from the Slackware crew. Even my dullest quetions were answered with great patience, explaining me the often simple mechanics in Slackware, that I was unable to see myself after being spoiled by too much overbred "high-tech".

These are huge advantages that, however, only appear when using Slackware for a longer period of time. They are over-shadowed by the short and volatile impressions you may get from just installing and using it for only a few hours. The installer of Slackware works just fine and let's you do things like root partition encryption that are much harder to achieve with other distros. E. g., for my OpenSUSE system (I still have one) I did the encryption by running the Slackware installation, first, without installing any packages, before I installed OpenSUSE, as the OpenSUSE installer would not allow me to do it the way I wanted it. But this is a rather complex setup that would never be covered in an average distro review. Which is ok, as only few users have a need for that kind of information, and most of them are probably Slackers, already. But the OpenSUSE installer just "looks better". And like with cars, design sells.

Slackware by comparison to other distributions is fairly straight forward in documentation. When I first used it over 10 years ago, I found its installation far easier to use than other distributions out there including, at the time, Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE, and Debian.

To be honest, Slackware scares the crap out of a lot of radicals in the GNU/Linux community because it promotes proper UNIX etiquette, simplicity, and doing things the UNIX-way and not just the Linux way, and some would like nothing better than to see Slackware shut down and cast aside. Slackware, LFS, Gentoo, and several others are a major thorn in the side of the big brand of Linux who'd like nothing better than to be the next Microsoft and are trying to get their way thanks to several developers, in my opinion.

Another thing that bothers me is how text/ncurses-based install process are "too hard" when they are pretty much straight-foward, read what you have on your screen, follow step by step and you are done.

The truth is that Americans, as well as most people, I think are superficial. If it LOOKS hard then it is hard. It does not matter if it actually is hard. It just LOOKS hard. And CLI and text based installs LOOK hard.

To be honest, Slackware scares the crap out of a lot of radicals in the GNU/Linux community because it promotes proper UNIX etiquette, simplicity, and doing things the UNIX-way and not just the Linux way, and some would like nothing better than to see Slackware shut down and cast aside. Slackware, LFS, Gentoo, and several others are a major thorn in the side of the big brand of Linux who'd like nothing better than to be the next Microsoft and are trying to get their way thanks to several developers, in my opinion.

I think you might be right about that, and that may be why it receives bad reviews. Overall it is actually easy to install, especially if you read about the install process first.

Personally, I wouldn't select a distro based on a review. Why ? Because most distros are free and I can try them and see for myself. Reviews are for things that cost money, and therefore would require buying first.

Slackware also comes in a very minimal state. From the bootable ISO, you must partition your hard drive with command line tools, and then use a setup script to complete the installation onto your hard drive. From there, you can do whatever you wish with your system.

You’re likely not done, however, because all this installs for your is a command-driven system. If you want a GUI you’ll need to install drivers, the X window system, and a desktop environment of your choice.

I doubt that reviewer ever get it installed.

Probably not, and the last paragraph is slightly inaccurate. Here's the FTFY version:

Quote:

You’re likely not done, however, because all this presents you with is a command-driven system. If you want a GUI you’ll need to type startx to start the X window system and the desktop environment you chose from the installation menu.

It seems the Slackware maintainer expects a user to be able to read documentation and even type. The horror!

I think you might be right about that, and that may be why it receives bad reviews. Overall it is actually easy to install, especially if you read about the install process first.

Personally, I wouldn't select a distro based on a review. Why ? Because most distros are free and I can try them and see for myself. Reviews are for things that cost money, and therefore would require buying first.

Free distribution versus paid-for distributions are fickle at best. No two distributions are exactly the same to warrant reviews based on comparisons between them.

Slackware is free, yet even if you buy a copy, you aren't getting any less quality in support as fairly much the community here at LQ is the main support vector.

The best distributions in my opinion have the best communities that back them up like Slackware and LQ.

Bad reviews often come from biased groups and individuals who are paid off, hired by, or affiliated with certain companies who want bad reviews pushed out. The only real bad reviews I've known are bad reviews, are those from non-affiliated testing groups who do full comparisons with re-reviews 3, 6, and 9 months from their original reviews in a follow up.

A lot of negative reviews of Slackware are so similar that I believe they're based on a template donated to reviewers by someone who tried and failed with it in 1994:

Quote:

Keywords to use: oldest distribution, antiquated installer, no package management. Fill in the rest of the review with FUD, fluff, and nonsense.

Very rarely do they mention SlackBuilds, sbopkg, and queuefiles.
I didn't read any reviews, positive or negative, before I installed Slackware 10.0 in late 2004/early 2005, just a brief article about installing it. If I had read any, I'd have ignored them, preferring to rely on my own judgement - which is infallible. ( )

I came to Slackware, because I was using Ubuntu, SuSe and other distros for a long time before.

I hopped from distribution to distribution, hoping to find the perfect one - but instead my collections of things that I hate just grew bigger and bigger.

After a while I hated:

Bloated kernels and packages with a lot of custom patches (Ubuntu) - in reviews often referred to as "high compatiblity"

Senseless GUIs that only work halfway through the system just because developers think that "Apple is the best" (Dreamlinux) - in reviews often referred to as "state of the art that doesn't have to hide behind the beauty of modern OSes"

GUI changes just because developers think that "we really have to have a new version" (Yoper, switching to KDE 4.0 and ditching 3.x) - okay seriously, even the reviews bashed the new KDE release, so there is nothing to say about that.

Dependency management (nearly all of the distributions I used) - You want to install Skype? Yeah, why not delete pulseaudio? Oh wait you can't because you need Skype for that - in reviews often referred to as "simple package management without any hassles")

I think at some time I was really angry at the Linux world, because I knew that the potential of doing things better than on Windows was SO GREAT - but every little distribution just kicked some standards down the drain for eyecandy or various other reasons and made it difficult to use it.

At some point I even wanted to build Linux from scratch to just use the kernel and packages like they were intended to, but I remember reading a note on a news site (I think it was golem.de) about "the oldest distribution in existance" and users bashing their head against that article because of the stupid Slackware not delivering any packages or resolving dependencies or "why the hell doesn't it start up properly, I don't have X") - and so I finally found the one distribution that is just doing it right by reading an article that the majority found bad.

I conclude: Bad reviews aren't so bad. It just depends on how you read them.

I didn't read any reviews, positive or negative, before I installed Slackware 10.0 in late 2004/early 2005, just a brief article about installing it. If I had read any, I'd have ignored them, preferring to rely on my own judgement - which is infallible.

I started with 10.1. I had read horrors about Slackware being as user-friendly as "a nest of rattle snakes". My distro of choice at that time was discontinued (LBA Linux) and I was not very happy with Fedora Core. So, I read everything at Slackware's web-site, even printed some pages (I still keep them ) and gave it a try. It was stunningly fast, didn't have one particularly annoying bug in X11* and behaved very stable.

That's it.

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* mouse cursor appeared as a square of vertical lines of inverted colour